


Collection of Cracks

by TinoSquint



Series: The Angst in the Episodes [3]
Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 11:38:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11379432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinoSquint/pseuds/TinoSquint
Summary: Brennan spends this episode trying to get closer to Booth, but all he does is push her away. How do they each deal with those choices after the case is over?





	Collection of Cracks

**Author's Note:**

> My plan for now is to post this story once a week, on Sundays. My goal is to aim for a schedule slow enough that I can write enough over the summer in order to continue to post regularly through the school year. For that to work, I need to be writing far faster than I am posting. So I am hoping to write roughly two chapters of this story a week and post one a week. Additionally, this chapter uses some italics for Brennan to analyze moments that aren’t verbatim from the show, which is breaking from my usual pattern, I know. Any dialogue, however, that is in italics will still be from the show verbatim. The other italics in this chapter are flashbacks to moments that would have taken place during the timeline of the episode, but that we didn’t see on screen.

She sits in the booth long after the others have left, nursing her second glass of wine so she has an excuse to stay. Sid carries over a second meal for her, exactly what she wanted, yet again, so she pastes a smile onto her face for a moment. As he walks away and she takes a bite, the smile drops, but not because she is displeased with Sid’s choice. Her eyes flash to his empty seat at the bar. “Why doesn’t he believe I can do anything like a normal person?” she asks herself, although she immediately answers her own question. “Because you can’t, Tempe, you’re too broken to be normal. You have your emotions locked in a box under all the bodies you’ve identified so you can do your job—so you can live your life—without your past—and their pasts—crushing you.” She sighs and finishes her glass of wine, looking over to Sid at the bar for another.

* * *

He sits on his couch, the Flyers game on his TV but not registering in his head, wondering why all he did this case was push her away. She tried to keep up pleasant conversation in the car on the way to the scene, but he shut her down to give her a lesson on politics, not trusting her to be tactful on her own. “But she has never shown any tact,” he mutters to himself, trying to pry away the guilt he feels. Booth knows he hurt her, he heard it in her voice when she said he thinks she’s too task-oriented. But if he ever wants to move up at the Bureau, he needs a partner who can help him play the politics.

* * *

She finishes her meal and the third glass of wine and pushes herself up from the table. She leaves cash on the table, enough to cover the meals and a generous tip, even though she doesn’t know what she owes. As she walks out of the restaurant to her car, she tries to push the memory out of her head. The memory of the moment he thought she couldn’t even feel sadness over the death of a young boy and express that to his parents just because she’s “bad with people.” He didn’t see the pain on her face as the words left his mouth, or at least she doesn’t think he did, which is for the best. He can’t know that he has the power to hurt her without meaning to because then he can use that power. “Everyone you’ve ever trusted has hurt you,” she says to herself as she drives home. “It’s better not to trust, it’s better to stay closed off, that way he can’t hurt you.”

But as these words leave her mouth she remembers the moment after their first case after she arrived home from Guatemala, remembers how she told him about her family, and how he responded by telling her about the weight of his time as a sniper. Maybe she isn’t as good at closing herself off to him as she wants to tell herself she is. As she walks through the door into her apartment, she pulls off her coat, throwing it onto the couch before moving into the kitchen to grab a bottle of wine. She told herself she’d only have two glasses, but she’d already surpassed that at Wong Fu’s and she couldn’t keep the hurt from breaking through sober. It will be harder to hide from it drunk, but at least the alcohol will dull the pain.

* * *

_“I’m not a sociopath, Booth.”_ Her words ring in his head, louder than the buzzer signaling the end of the Flyers game. Why would she say that? “Because she feels like you don’t think she has human emotions, idiot.” His internal voice fights through his attempt to distance himself from the statement, to pretend it wasn’t a direct response to his words. God, why did he have to be so harsh with her? “Because she frustrates you, Booth. She doesn’t let you in when all you want is to know everything about her.” He shakes his head, determined to not let himself continue to hurt her like this, no matter how frustrating she is. If he ever wants to earn her trust, he needs to reign in his own emotions enough to protect hers, enough to eventually be _shown_ hers. He sees them in glimpses when she thinks he’s not looking or when he hurts her again. But he wants more than that. He wants her to show her emotions knowing that he can see them; he wants to be the one to help her through the pain, not be the one that causes it.

* * *

“When I was talking to Nestor’s mom at the end of the case,” she thinks, “in that moment he saw that I can be ‘human,’ whatever that means. I showed my emotions, I comforted her.” She pauses for a moment before speaking, “ _Without_ his prodding,” with the irritation rolling off her tongue. _“You got it right this time, Temperance.”_ His words are soothing, but they shouldn’t be. She feels rather than notices the condescension in the phrase, as if he is surprised by her ability to connect with another person. She wants to be offended at his attitude, but she can’t be. Truthfully, it surprised her a bit, too. She has spent so long hiding those emotions, burying them deeper as time goes on, in order to do her job, to bring closure to the bones on her table.

For the first time, she clears her mind for long enough for something else to register: he used her real name, not “Bones.” This realization fills her with warmth, just as the wine she’s holding does. But her given name on his lips has more power than all the wine in the world. Calling her Bones keeps her distant, which is how she knows she needs to be, but hearing him call her Temperance makes her crave his touch.

God, this man holds so much power over her and she’s barely even given him any information about herself. He manages to break through her barriers without even an idea of the barriers’ material. He just understands her on some level.

* * *

With Ambassador Olivos she got it right, she said exactly the right thing, and so this moment replays in Booth’s mind. He had left her alone, had let her handle the victim’s family on her own terms, and she had hit it out of the park. “Why couldn’t I have just trusted her for once? Had some faith in her?” But he doesn’t know whether Bones would have been pushed to try so hard to get it right if he hadn’t hurt her. “Maybe this hurt had a purpose, Seeley,” he thinks to himself before correcting himself. “No. You weren’t trying to motivate her; you don’t know how she reacts well enough to have caused this purposely. You hurt her out of frustration and trying to climb the Bureau ladder. Don’t try to pretend it had some nobler cause.”

As much as he does not want to admit it, Booth knows there’s another reason he spent this entire case brushing her off. He’s still upset that she sent him home to Tessa last case. He tried to move more towards friendship—hell, he needed to be with the person who knew the weight that taking Farid’s life would place on Booth—at the end of the last case. She didn’t care, though. She sent him home to his girlfriend, and that stung more than he liked to admit. So this case, he returned the favor. It was somewhat subconscious, he didn’t always realize he was doing it, but he took her attempts at growing their friendship and shut them down immediately. He didn’t realize he was hurting himself when he did that.

His previous train of thought, though, does not leave him. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in it. As much as he doesn’t want to admit it, at some point he is going to need to risk hurting her in order to break through those damn walls she builds around herself. But not yet. It’s not a thought he can bear yet, and besides, he needs to learn her better before he can risk that. If he doesn’t have a decent grasp on how she’s likely to react, then he’s hurting her just for the sake of hurting her.

So he moves on, replaying the rest of their interactions of today. His only thought, other than that he hopes she’s okay, is that he’s going to need to study her the way she studies her bones if he ever wants to have a shot with Temperance Brennan.

* * *

_After he calls her Temperance, she softens to him a bit. She decides she wants to give him a peace offering, so she gets him his own Jeffersonian badge so people don’t need to swipe him onto the platform all the time. “It’s practical,” she told herself as she was having it made._ Now, she pours the last of the wine bottle into her glass as she thinks about how she gave it to him _. She walked over and sat down next to him at the bar. She felt timid as she went because he had declared the bar his and his alone, a squint-free zone. “But,” she reasoned to herself, “he can’t get mad at me if I’m just coming over to be nice, to show him I care about him as my partner.”_

She replays the moment in her mind, the moment where she covered up what she wanted to say with a rational explanation. She wanted to say, “I trust you, Booth,” but instead she explained that she would try to “accord it an appropriate degree of worth.” She doesn’t know why she trusts him _or_ his digestive tract, but she finds that he does. _He thanks her and calls her Temperance again, but then something else flashes through his eyes. She can’t detect what it is before he says, “So, uh, what part of ‘this is mine’ did you not understand?”_ Her fear in coming over here had been valid after all. She regrets it. She always does. It’s never smart to allow yourself to be open, to forego the rational for the emotional. It only leads to pain.

* * *

_She’s gonna trust his gut. She comes over to the bar and tells him she’s gonna try to trust his gut. All of a sudden his stomach is doing backflips and it’s like he can’t find his footing._

Even now, when it’s only a memory, he places two feet squarely on the floor to ground himself. She has never seemed more unreadable than in this moment.

_“Thank you, Temperance,” escaped his mouth before he could stop it. Her eyes softened as he used her first name, which made him freeze._

He cringes at the memory of how cruel he was to her after she let down her walls a bit. _“So, uh, what part of ‘this is mine’ did you not understand?”_ He didn’t mean to say it, and thinking about it now sends him to the fridge to grab a beer. As he takes a sip, the image of her stricken face as his words hit her floods his brain.

* * *

The words hit her and immobilize her. Just as she is about to respond by handing him the badge and leaving, he fires another bullet. It’s evident that he was a sniper, because the words hit their intended target even though there was only a quarter-sized opening in her defenses. _“Have to say it in Latin?” He laughs as he says it, cutting her even deeper._

Tears come to her eyes as she remembers the moment.

_She looks down and smirks._

As she sits on her couch, she is grateful that she has this type of dig thrown at her frequently. It always stings a bit, but she’s learned to cover the pain by matching the speaker’s tone. He laughed as he said it, so she smirked. But this time, the words were more than a minor sting. They were a shot through her heart.

* * *

_“Have to say it in Latin?” he laughs._

In the moment, the words felt cathartic. She builds up these barriers around herself that he doesn’t know how to break, so he just tries to push her away.

_He laughs as she stands and places something next to him on the bar as she walks away. She says something in Latin that he doesn’t understand, so he ignores it. He picks up the new Jeffersonian ID—his Jeffersonian ID—and smiles even bigger, muttering “thank you” even though she can’t hear it from her booth with the other squints._

As he sits back down in his armchair with the beer, he picks up the ID and begins to spin it in his fingers. He puts it down and reaches over to pull his laptop onto his legs. He opens Google and types in some combination of letters that sort of look like they _might_ be what she said as she walked away. When that returns no usable results, he adds “translate from Latin” and Google responds “Did you mean ‘ _absit invidia’_ translate from Latin?” He clicks to show results for that search, cause those words seem like Latin to him.

* * *

_She stands to leave the bar, to leave_ his _place. As she moves, she hands him the Jeffersonian ID she had made up for him and says, “Absit invidia.”_

“Absit invidia.” Why did she say that when his words hurt her so much?

* * *

“Let ill will be absent.” This is what his Google search turns up. So he guesses that means she wasn’t upset about him sending him away from the bar, about the Latin comment.

* * *

“Tempe, you said it because no matter how much it hurt you, you don’t want to hurt him,” she mutters to herself. It’s hard for her to rationalize this behavior. Hiding her pain is logical; by building up her barriers she appears outwardly stronger and wards off people from trying to break through the walls. Her walls protect her from suffering the pain she experienced when her parents disappeared. But her desire to protect him despite his callous remarks that hurt her doesn’t make sense. Rationally, she should allow him to feel the same type of pain he causes, to agonize when he hurts her like she does if she harms him. “He wouldn’t agonize over it, though, because he doesn’t care. He hurt you, he took a low blow, and then laughed about it.”

* * *

“Wait,” he thinks as wheels in his head begin to turn. “If she felt the need to say she’s not mad about it, then it means she has reason to be offended by it. _Shit._ What did I do?” The sense of panic that had just left him returns as he processes what he said earlier that day. Setting the laptop aside, he takes another swig of his beer and tries to process how he hurt her with the Latin comment. He knows he was wrong to send her away when she offered an olive branch, but what about the final comment was so bad?

* * *

She swirls the last sips of wine in her glass before taking it all down in one swig. She checks the clock: 1 AM. She has to be up for work in five hours, but she’s still sitting on her couch drinking. She knows she is going to regret it in the morning, but she can’t pull herself away from the couch. She can’t get the fact that he doesn’t care about her out of her head.

But more than that, she thought he could see through her walls. If he could, though, he would have known the Latin comment hit too close to home. She uses her academic language—and her work as a whole—to cope. The normal world and its emotions crushed her when her parents left, so she took refuge in what she had left: knowledge, school, her intelligence, and herself. To this day, she hides behind her façade of genius. True, she is brilliant, but she feels more than she lets on. And up until now, it has worked for her. Until now, people couldn’t penetrate it. “Shouldn’t you be happy that he can’t see through your walls like you thought he could?” she asks herself, shaking her head. Rationally, she knows she should be happy about this discovery, so why isn’t she?

* * *

Booth has left the couch and is pacing around his living room with a beer in one hand and the ID in his other. He racks his brain, but nothing seems to explain how a joke about her understanding Latin better than normal people talk could have hurt her. Suddenly he stops and shouts, “Dammit!” as he slams his beer onto the coffee table, some of it splashing over the top. “It’s like with the sociopath comment. She feels like I can’t see her as a human.”

* * *

Part of her wants him to break down her walls. She’s terrified of the repercussions, but part of her wants him to make her feel, to truly allow herself to feel whatever it is that she feels for him. But she can’t. She enjoys the work she does with him. She enjoys working with him, it’s brought a new level of fulfillment to her life. She loves identifying her World War I remains, but she appreciates giving bones an identity and justice before they’ve been in boxes for decades. She enjoys the feeling of pride that fills her chest when she learns that a killer has been convicted using evidence she found for the prosecutor. “Why can’t you lower your walls and continue this work?” she thinks. She sighs at her own illogical question. “Because, Temperance, everyone you have ever loved, everyone who has ever seen you without your walls, has abandoned you and taken a part of you with them in the process. With Booth, the piece he takes would be your work with the FBI.”

* * *

“I spent this entire case hurting her. All I did was insult her and push her away, yet she made _two_ peace offerings. I thought _she_ was supposed to be the one who has her walls up so high she can’t even look at others, not me. So why am I the one pushing her away while she tries to make amends for the sins she did not commit?” He’s pacing again as these thoughts race through his head. “She could have left it at her concession that maybe my gut instinct does have some value. After all, as soon as she did that I pushed her away, and I pushed hard, but she still gave me the ID…I don’t understand her. Every time I think I have her figured out, she goes and does something unexpected.”

* * *

She washes the makeup off her face and brushes her teeth while she tries to replay her last actions towards him in her head. She pushed her logic aside to show she trusted him, but he pushed her away. Instead of walking away silent, she played into his Latin joke and told him, in Latin, that she wasn’t upset with him, although she was. Then, she gave him the Jeffersonian ID. Another example of trust, this time in their partnership. She trusts their partnership and values it enough that she wants his access to the lab to be as full as her own in order to aid the investigation. The lab is her sanctuary, and she really hopes he understands how much trust this act required.

“Why does he just keep pushing me away when I try to let him a little closer?” she asks herself as she climbs into bed and turns off the light. The question rings in her head as she drifts into sleep and stays throughout her dreams.

* * *

Although Bones is sleeping in her apartment, Booth is still wide awake in his. He searches his mind, trying to find the answers. Why is he pushing her away? Why is she continuing to be nice to him? Why did she tell him to go home to Tessa the last time they sat together at the bar in Wong Fu’s? Why did he listen? Why hasn’t he called Tessa since? Sure, he answers when she calls him, but that’s not the same thing.

The last question is the only one he can answer: he’s stopped calling Tessa because the pull that Bones has on him is too strong. And maybe that answers the rest of the questions too. Maybe he’s pushing because if he doesn’t he will be unable to escape her. And maybe she’s still being nice to him because she feels a similar pull towards him. He shakes his head at that thought. She can’t feel drawn to him, can she?

He ponders this for a moment, and then realizes that maybe she does. From what he can see, she has her walls up a mile high and at least six feet thick on all sides, but she’s showing him the cracks. Crack one: her parents’ disappearance. Crack two: “I am not a sociopath.” Crack three: absit invidia. “These cracks are the key,” he mutters to himself as he pulls off his jeans and swapping them for sweats before climbing into bed. “If I can collect enough of these little cracks, maybe I’ll understand her well enough to lead her towards putting a hole in the walls. And then, if I react to that hole correctly, maybe I can do something about this pull she has over me.”

With that, he falls asleep. When he wakes the next morning, he’s made a decision. He is going to call Tessa to end things, and then he is going to put his energy into trying to understand Temperance Brennan as well as she understands human bones.

* * *

Brennan leans on her hands with her elbows on her desks fighting to keep her eyes open. Angela walks in, takes one look at her best friend, and knows something is up. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” she asks.

Brennan freezes for a second before stumbling over her words. “I’m – nothing – I’m fine.”

“Bren, you may be a brilliant forensic anthropologist, but you’re a terrible liar. Tell me the truth. Does this have something to do with whatever kept you at that restaurant last night after the rest of us left.”

Brennan sighs, knowing she has been caught in her lie. She’s afraid to tell Angela because Angela _will_ go back to meddling in her relationship with Booth the minute she has the opportunity. Despite this fear, Brennan tells her friend what’s happening. She knows there’s no use lying and is quite frankly too hung over and too tired to try. “I’m confused, Angela. Booth tried so hard to get me to agree to work with him again—he made TSA catch me at the airport when I came back from Guatemala—but now it’s like he’s pushing me away every time I feel like we’re becoming…friends.” She doesn’t know how to describe her relationship with Booth, but she knows “friends” doesn’t quite fit.

“Are you finally admitting you have a thing for him?” Angela asks with a sparkle in her eyes.

“ _What?_ No, of course not. I’m just saying that I’m confused. And as I’m quite intelligent, that doesn’t happen frequently, so it concerns me.”

“But you’re hungover, sweetie. Confusion does not lead to drowning your sorrows in a bottle of wine. What is it really? Spill.”

“Honestly, I don’t know, Angela,” she pauses for a moment. Defeated, Brennan lies her head on her desk as her best friend comes over to try continue trying to get some answers so she can help Brennan book a ticket on the ride that is Agent Booth.

With her head still buried in her arms on the desk, Brennan mutters, “What does it mean that he called me _his_ forensic anthropologist, Angela? I understand that it must mean something, but I have no idea what.”


End file.
